Author's Note: This was supposed to be a happy, mellow chapter but I cannot be trusted.


[15/11/16]


You exist elsewhere and within me.


He wishes he wasn't drunk when he hears it. He doesn't know what they're saying now, doesn't know what they're doing, but he can see Sora smiling politely as she looks at the little velvet box and Jyou's blue eyes are burning straight into him. He doesn't know how to wave it off without drawing more attention to himself so he takes another gulp but it has turned to sand in his mouth and what little is left of his pride stops him from spitting it out.

He stands up, wiping his mouth on the back of a napkin and Taichi's hand encloses around his wrist. He wants to yell "fuck off", but he only tugs softly, smiles tight-lipped.

"I have to go."

"But we're celebrating."

He stops and he thinks they all may be holding their breaths but at the last minute only mutters, "Don't let me stop you," and leaves.

.

.

"Open the door."

The world is still spinning and he doesn't know how to make it stop, so he closes his eyes and wishes the banging on the door away. It doesn't leave (he never does), and finally Yamato opens when Taichi is just about to kick the door down.

"Do you mind?"

"I can't believe you just left like that."

He lets himself in, like a typhoon, and Yamato sighs wearily as he closes the door.

"I'm busy."

"Doing what?" Taichi asks, and Yamato wants to say dying, but he only shrugs and sits quietly on one of the low couches.

"I got a headache."

"Since when?"

"About a second ago."

Taichi stands, uncharacteristically angry. Yamato is too drunk and maybe too heartbroken to care.

"You're one of my best friends," he says, voice low. "You're supposed to be happy for me."

He leaves before Yamato has a chance to say something, anything.

.

.

He sees her the next day and runs away before she can notice he was there, fearing a betrayal too close to home. He is light on his feet, lighter than the cigarette that somehow wounds itself between long, pale fingers as the smoke cleanses the air around him, turns it into something he can more or less breathe.

"That'll kill you someday, you know."

Eyes sharpened, he turns towards her with a disdainful curl on his mouth.

"Might as well," he exhales.

Her fingers are too warm, too thin, too much ... not her, not her, and he has to stop himself from yanking his arm from under them. Instead, he returns her pitying look with one that lacks entirely any warmth. He can't stand his own reflection in her round spectacles and closes his eyes, pretending to be enjoying the burning in his lungs.

Then he remembers.

"It'll kill you, too."

.

.

There are fireflies circling the surface of the lake and the humbugs strike a chord from somewhere far gone, a childhood he doesn't remember as being entirely his. The party is elegant, intimate and he thinks, faintly, this is how it ends.

"When I die," he says, unprompted but sure this is what he wants, "I'd like my wake to be like this."

Koushiro offers him a small, nervous laugh.

"Don't let Mimi-san hear you say that," he breathes, hiding behind a glass of cool summer red wine. "It's her engagement party."

His breath hitches for one, two, three heartbeats.

Then, he chuckles.

.

.

The way she looked in that blue dress haunts him all day and it takes three full glasses to drown the memory of her in it that night.

.

.

He gropes for her upstairs, in the back of the car, in the otherwise unused guest room at her mother's flat. Some nights, her body is soft and flushed like flowers fresh from the picking and other nights, her body is slender like the back of a handgun. He never knows which one is worse, which one he can't stand, which tastes fouler — the salt on her cheeks or the blood on his four knuckles, the aftermath.

"Do you love her?" she asks one night and he looks at her like he wants to die.

And maybe he does, so she never asks again.

.

.

Sometimes, the children-they-once-were come out to play and the bedroom turns into a make-believe place. Sometimes, they talk.

"Why do you suppose, they call it making love?"

"They were tired," he answers, shifting on the bed, eyes closed against her hair — all shades of wrong, too straight, too short.

"Of what?"

His hand finds her wet cunt and his tongue finds her mouth, biting down, hard.

"Of fucking."

.

.

She never loved him but he was heat at the peak of summer and she was ripe like the sweetest peach he had ever sunk his teeth in. The milky touch of her skin and the sounds she made when she came, memories he kept like flowers tucked between the pages of old hymnals. His fingers worked themselves upon every expanse of soft tissue, bone and muscle and he knew even then that he would always starve.

"Is this — is this good for you?"

It was like fruit between her legs, just wet enough. He swallowed one wanton moan after another and when they were done and she could taste herself in him, her laughter purred like a feline, something not entirely human.

"I think I love you."

.

.

Her sniffles wake him up and he sits, wondering if he should touch her.

"Why are you crying?"

"It's nothing, I'm sorry. Go back to sleep—," she says, but the phone is on her hand and then it is in his before she can even finish whimpering.

The sight of her wearing all white, eyes bright and the caption reads, 'I found the one'.

He doesn't know how to comfort Miyako and she has never known how to comfort him either so the phone is left on the floor and the screen blacks out while he tries to find forgiveness in the shape of her body, slaughtering all the love he has for another woman every time his body slams into this one, like cars on a crash test site.

The pain he feels is old, dull and the wounds are opening anew. Yamato wonders, not for the first time, if this is how it feels to die.

.

.

They marry in the spring, when the cherries are in bloom.

The ceremony is everything he had ever imagined for her and she looks just the way she did when they were sixteen and sweet, reckless and falling in and out of love. Taichi's eyes are glossy and he cannot help the heat behind his own when she looks at him so full of promise and love. Yamato stands next to Koushiro — the best man, always the better man, and never sees the knife that twists between his ribs when they kiss as husband and wife.

I object, I object, I object.

His whole body is in protest but he clasps Taichi's hand and kisses Mimi's cheek and, because he can't help it (never can, not with her, not here, not today), his fingers dig into her waist.

"You deserve to be happy."

Miyako is watching from the stands and he offers her a sour smile, not missing how her hand is clasped tightly in Ken's.

.

.

The world is tinted in hues of brown and his eyes look like an unkempt pool of their youth. In the two years they have been apart, the weight on his chest has lessened, the noose around his neck no longer tight enough to bruise. He has turned himself into his work, his life, the girlfriend he expects one day to make his wife.

"I'm working," he says without looking.

"Don't let me stop you."

He pauses, glancing up.

"Yagami Mimi," his assistant announces, flustered.

"A friend."

Her arms are around his neck and it is altogether too warm, too familiar, too dangerous.

And years of practice won't allow him to hesitate in holding her back.

.

.

It's not that she is disenchanted with married life. The home they have is everything she had ever wanted, everything she had ever dreamed. She has a loving husband that only dreams of making her happy and she knows this, even says it as his hand reaches out for hers. Sometimes, she says so when she's naked and half asleep.

"History repeats itself," she says, her shoulder falling in a disdainful shrug he knows all too well.

He takes a sip of warm mulled wine, shaking his head. Not for us, he thinks, not for us.

But hearts are dumb things and he can barely keep his under his skin when it so longs to be ripped out and go back to her.

"Are you miserable?" he asks, dreading the answer.

"No," she says, her smile weaker now. "Would you like me to be?"

"No," he says, scoffing, eyes downcast. "Yes."

She is closer now, closer than she has been in years and the table and all that is between them has been all but forgotten.

"Yes, what?" she asks, a ghost of her lips brushing his as their foreheads touch.

"Yes, I want you to be miserable."

.

.

Sometimes he wants to kill her, kill him, kill himself, then. In the middle of it he realises — too late for realisations, too late for warnings of girls who burn too bright and boys who drown at sea, that this isn't what they meant when they thought of making love. Surely nothing like this can be called that, not when it's ugly, and selfish and unkind? Not when he wants to slam into her and make her cry, surely not, when she begs him to do just that?

When he tells her, "I want to fuck you until I die," he means he wants to fuck her until he dies, because it has gotten too painful, has gone on for too long for him to stop. He finds himself sleepless most nights and she is running out of lullabies and he knows, he knows it is mental to keep letting her suck down on his blood. Surely this time she will finally kill him.

Instead she tells him how all this, and love, will ruin them.

Yamato knows it already has.